The question that Abul Khaizuran
repeatedly asks himself at the end of the story is one that the reader is left
to mull over too without any conclusive answer: why didn’t Abu Qais, Marwan or
Assad knock? One can consider conventional answers to the question such as they
did knock but Abul Khaizuran had been detained and therefore could not respond
promptly. Hannah Arendt provides a much more satisfactory answer in her essay
“We Refugees,” saying that to a refugee death is more preferable than such a
meaningless existence, and how taking one’s life is often an act of freedom.
But one more possible answer can be
attained by drawing a parallel comparison from prison film and literature. The
importance of prison literature when engaging with the world of the prison is
the engagement with the self, and the relationship of the self with this new
world. Hence, prison literature’s main function is to enable an understanding
of the prisoner’s identity, which is in flux ever since the entrance of the
prisoner through the prison walls. Besides dividing the flow of time through
repetitive routines, it deletes the prisoner’s existence from society by
closing in movements and making the prisoner untraceable, which, according to
Kierkegaard, is the worst hell any human can experience. Therefore there is a
perversion of permanence, in which the prison erases the permanence of the
prisoner’s existence from society while the prisoner has to deal with the
permanence of his crime every day. Hence the comparison can be drawn with “Men
in the Sun,” as the Palestinian refugees must deal with an exilic existence where
their existence within their national society has been permanently removed,
yet, as the constant shifts in the temporal narrative suggests, the refugees
must deal with the permanence of their exilic status every day. Prison
literature is intricately tied with a search for a whole identity, one which is
not fragmented by these constraints and their effects of isolation and secrecy
on the individual prisoner, and which is based on an intimate knowledge of
these constraints imposed, and so frequently such exploration of identity in
prison literature is extrapolated to include a search for the national
identity, and probe the conditions of the prison world as a microcosm of the
conditions of the state in the real world.
Prisons institutionalize prisoners
by undermining the relationship the body has with space, and depriving them of
the very human need for bodily motion. The walking routines that are imposed
are regimented and destination-oriented. This severe need for bodily motion can
be seen when prisoners, during times of extreme duress, pace back and forth in
their cells. That limited movement imposes and reinforces a static existence. However,
in “Men in the Sun,” the irony is that these refugees find themselves in vast
expanses of desert, and yet the vastness produces a more claustrophobic atmosphere
than an expansive one. Movement is limited, or more to the point, aimless, so
that there is no freedom or contingency to be found in walking. This aimless
and constricted atmosphere is compounded by a crippling feeling of isolation in
a country “whose blinding sun signifies the universal indifference to [their]
fate” (“Arabic Prose and Prose Fiction After 1948” 52). A 2009 article about
long-term solitary confinement in prison presents a socio-psychological thesis that
isolation can have as traumatic an impact upon an individual as a head injury,
as the mind slowly disintegrates into nothingness after extended minimal social
interaction (“Hellhole” by Atul Gawande). According to Gawande, UCSC professor Craig
Haney received rare permission to study a hundred randomly selected inmates in
solitary confinement at California’s Pelican Bay supermax, and noted how
prisoners first “begin to lose the ability to initiate behavior of any kind—to
organize their own lives around activity and purpose… [after which] (c)hronic
apathy, lethargy, depression, and despair often result.” This apathy and
despair again can be seen amongst the Palestinian refugees whom society now
found meaningless and hence for whom life has now been rendered meaningless.
Therefore, another answer as to why
they did not knock can be drawn from the prison movie “Papillon”: when the titular
character Papillon is released from solitary confinement, the only way he can
cope with the freedom that this expansion of space provides him with is by counting
the steps. The cell he was in was five paces wide, and in moments when he felt
himself slipping into delusion, he retreaded those paces to assure himself of
reality. But upon release, when he counts his steps, he collapses on the sixth
step, unable to bear with a reality which negates the boundaries of his former
existence. This bears a strong resemblance to the situation the refugees find
themselves in when, upon the cusp of transcending the border their thoughts and
actions had revolved around, they find release in death.
The idea that the men in the van had become institutionalized within that space to define themselves by it alone is something quite powerful. It fits the arching theme of displacement from the normal setting resulting in a displacement of identity and a search for that way back, meanwhile outlining even the smallest of solid spaces as ones own in such a fluid state. However, I would like to raise the fact that at the same time, one could say it doesnt fit with their attitudes seen before this particular tragedy occurred. For if they had made that tank their solid space beyond which they wouldnt adapt, then why lie atop each other in a connection almost familial, or with the land like Abu Qais when he rests after departing the tank? Why choose to move ahead towards Kuwait, departing gratefully out of the tank each other time, only to end up considering it their solid space right before they would be free? Theres something quite subverted in men embracing their chains the moment before those chains are removed. To say that an apathy or depression struck them wouldnt fit either, taking again into account the resistance of Marwan to enter the tank, or the closeness he formed with Abu Qais. Of course, as their ends are quite absent from our sight, we can only base our cases on assumptions and examples of their former behaviour, in which case yours could ring true-- and yet, from another perspective, doesnt fit in with their previous behaviour. One can equally say they knocked but werent heard due to the van's noise; that Abul Khaizuran, so consumed by his anger, humiliation, fear and the need to depart was unable to hear them as they knocked. There are numerous possibilities and so naturally, your own cannot be discarded. But for me, I believe the intriguing idea that they had become institutionalised doesnt piece together with their former behaviour-- in other words, from a more arching perspective, our characters hadn't likely turned submissive to the chains that bound them. As such even the view on exilic characters in general can be more positive, and change the seemingly negative tone-- the characters may have died, but there is no telling whether they died struggling regardless of being forsaken, or submissively giving in.
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